What’s the Function of Criticism? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #36 with Critic Noah Berlatsky

in Film, Literature, Music, Pretty Much Pop | March 26th, 2020

Do we need professional critics regulating our entertainment intake? Noah has written for numerous publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC News, The Guardian, Slate, and Vox, and his work has come up for discussion in multiple past Pretty Much Pop episodes.

He was invited to join hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt in spelling out the functions of criticism, the idea of criticism as art, ideological vs. aesthetic critique, and whether there’s anything wrong with being negative about other people’s art. While we talk mostly about film, Noah also writes about TV, comics, music and more.

First, read some articles by Noah about criticism:

Other authors speaking on the utility of critics:

“Do We Still Need Critics in This Age of Opinion?” by Sarah Donaldson
“Are Music Critics Pointless?” by Emily Zemler
“Accentuate the Positive: Why Music Critics Write So Many Favorable Reviews” by Timothy Gabrielle
National Review critic Armond White talking about this on the Slashfilm podcast

Here are some examples of Noah’s critical work relevant to what came up in the interview and our recent episodes:

Included here with Noah’s permission, here’s some criticism directed at Noah:

“Why Doesn’t the Atlantic Fire Noah Berlatsky?” by Ted Rall
“The Rant: Who the Hell is Noah Berlatsky & Why Is He Trashing Bob Dylan?” by Michael Goldberg
“Worst Op-Ed of the Year? We Have a Weiner and His Name Is Noah Berlatsky” by Ken Silverstein

At the end, after Noah leaves, Mark lays out a taxonomy of criticism: supporter, decoder, taste enforcer, and hater. Noah practices all of these! Follow him on Twitter @nberlat and get scads of his writing by supporting him at patreon.com/noahberlatsky.

Watch Mel Brooks’ depiction of the very first critic.

This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Meet the World’s First Known Author: Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

in Literature, Poetry | March 25th, 2020

Watchers of Westworld will have heard a character in the most recent episode utter the line, “for the first time, history has an author.” It’s as loaded a bit of dialogue as the series has dropped on fans, not least for its suggestion that in the absence of a god we should be better off with an all-knowing machine.

The line might bend the ear of literary scholars for another reason. The idea of authorship is a complicated one. In one sense, maybe, everyone is an author of history, and in another, perhaps no one is. But it’s difficult to comprehend these abstractions—we crave stories with strong characters, hence our veneration of Great Men and Women of the past.

Still, in many times and places, individual authorship was irrelevant. Renaissance thinkers revalued the author as an auctoritas, a worthy figure of influence and renown. “Death of the author” theorists pointed out that the appearance of a literary text could never be reduced to a single, unchanging personality. In religious studies, questions of authorship open onto minefield after minefield. There may be no commonly agreed-upon way to think about what an author is.

Does it make sense, then, to talk about the “world’s first author”? Perhaps. In the TED-Ed lesson above by Soraya Field Fiorio, we learn that the first known person to use written language for literary purposes was named was Enheduanna, a powerful Mesopotamian high priestess who wrote forty-two hymns and three epic poems in cuneiform 4,3000 hundred years ago.

Daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who placed her in a position to rule, Enheduanna lived about “1,500 years before Homer and about 500 years before the Biblical patriarch Abraham.” (There’s considerable doubt, of course, about whether either of those people existed, whether they wrote the works attributed to them, or whether such works were penned by committee, so to speak.)

Sargon was also an author, having composed an autobiography, The Legend of Sargon, that “exerted a powerful influence over the Sumerians he sought to conquer,” notes Joshua J. Mark at the Ancient History Encyclopedia. But first, Enheduanna used her position as high priestess to unify her father’s empire with religious hymns that praised the gods of each major Sumerian city. “In her writing, she humanized the once aloof gods,” just as Homer would hundreds of years later. “Now they suffered, fought, loved, and responded to human pleading.”

Her hymns to Inanna are her most defining literary achievement, but Enheduanna has somehow been completely left out of history. “We know who the first novelist is,” writes Charles Halton at Lit Hub, “eleventh century Japanese Noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the Tale of Genji.” Likewise, we know the first novelist of the western world, Miguel de Cervantes, and the first essayist, Michel de Montaigne. But “ask any person in your life who wrote the first poem and they’re apt to draw a blank.”

Maybe this is because, unlike novels, we don’t think of poetry as being invented by a single individual. It seems as though it must have sprung from the collective psyche not long after humans began using language. Yet from the point of view of literary history—which, like most histories, consists of a succession of great names—Enheduanna certainly deserves the honor as the world’s first known poet and first known author. Learn more about her in the lesson above.

Watch a 4000-Year Old Babylonian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Harvard

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Novel the Coronavirus Has Made a Bestseller Again

in Literature | March 13th, 2020

The coronavirus, fair to say, isn’t good for the economy: not for the economies of individual nations, and not for the world economy as a whole. But that’s not to say that every industry has taken a hit. This is hardly the worst time in history to produce and sell toilet paper, for instance, nor to furnish the packages of necessities demanded by “preppers” who foresee the end of society as we know it. One probably wouldn’t wish to take the place of the makers of Corona beer right now, but despite the now-unfortunate brand name, their sales, too, have stayed strong. And for publishers around the world who have been considering a reprint of Albert Camus’ La Peste, now is most assuredly the time.

The Plague, as it’s titled in English, “follows the inhabitants of Oran, an Algerian town that is sealed off by quarantine as it is ravaged by bubonic plague,” writes The Guardian’s Alison Flood. “Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation to meet demand,” but last week stock had already sold out on Amazon.

“The publisher added that sales in the last week of February were up by 150% on the same period in 2019.” The novel has also become a bestseller in Italy — a country especially hard hit by the virus — and sales “have also risen sharply in France, according to the French books statistics website Edistat,” to the tune of “around 300% on the previous year.” I live in South Korea, one of the countries most severely hit by the coronavirus, and recently wrote an essay about reading The Plague here in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Though Camus tells a story set in real city and about a specific disease, his literary rendering of a community isolated and under invisible siege has the universal quality of myth. Each main character — the tireless doctor Rieux, the suicidal-turned-gregarious Cottard, the humanist outsider Tarrou — exemplifies a different arc of individual reaction to the crisis. Even in Seoul I noticed certain parallels: Camus’ description of the “commercial character of the town” and the work habits of its people, of the sudden runs on particular items thought to have preventative properties (peppermint lozenges, in the novel), of the fierce public attacks on the government whenever the struggle turns especially harrowing. Readers the world over will feel a grim sense of recognition at the Oran authorities’ unwillingness to call the plague a plague, due to “the usual taboo, of course; the public mustn’t be alarmed, that wouldn’t do at all.”

Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, five years after his best-known work The Stranger and just three years after the real Oran’s most recent outbreak of the bubonic plague. (You can get a primer on Camus’ life, work, and reluctantly existentialist philosophy in the animated School of Life video above.) Like The Stranger, and like all great works of art, The Plague permits more than one interpretation: J.M. Coetzee suggests one reading of the novel “as being about what the French called ‘the brown plague’ of the German occupation, and more generally as about the ease with which a community can be infected by a bacillus-like ideology.” But each era has its own reading of The Plague — in the year 2003, for instance, critic Marina Warner offered it up as a “study in terrorism” — and of all its readers and re-readers in this historical moment, how many could resist an entirely more literal interpretation?

Free Courses on the Coronavirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerging Pandemic

The Absurd Philosophy of Albert Camus Presented in a Short Animated Film by Alain De Botton

See Albert Camus’ Historic Lecture, “The Human Crisis,” Performed by Actor Viggo Mortensen

Albert Camus Explains Why Happiness Is Like Committing a Crime—”You Should Never Admit to it” (1959)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear H.P. Lovecraft Horror Stories Read by Roddy McDowall

in Literature | March 6th, 2020

“Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable,” goes a typical line in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. “Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied.” As a writer of what he called “weird fiction,” Lovecraft specialized in the narrator plunged into a loss for words by the sheer incomprehensibility of that which he sees before him. But in the case of this particular sentence, the narrator sees not an ancient monster awakened from its millennia of slumber but “nothing less than the solid ground” — or as the reader put it, nothing more than the solid ground. But then, most of us haven’t lived our entire lives locked up high in a castle.

The story is “The Outsider,” something of an outlier in the Lovecraft canon due to its outsized popularity as well as its Gothic tinge. By the author’s own admission, it owes a debt to his literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed represents Lovecraft’s “literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.”

In 1926 or today, one could do much worse for a model than Poe, and critics have also detected in “The Outsider” the possible influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Oscar Wilde. Anyone daring to read the story aloud must thus strike a balance between several different competing tones, and few could hope to outdo Roddy McDowall’s performance on the 1966 record above. But as Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher notes, that actor, “child star of Lassie Come Home and My Friend Flicka,” is “hardly a name one would associate with the master of the unnameable.”

Though McDowall would later “star in some jolly decent horror movies like The Legend of Hell House and Fright Night, he was in 1966 best known for the likes of “That Darn Cat! or Lord Love a Duck or the stage musical Camelot.” In the event, McDowell proved “almost a perfect choice to give life to Lovecraft’s words,” delivering a “light boyish charm” combined with an intonation that “causes a growing disquiet and a dreadful sense of unease,” altogether suitable for the work of “the weird and reclusive Lovecraft.” He also brings to the role the kind of faint, unexpectedly refined menace that would make him famous as Cornelius and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films. After “The Outsider” McDowall reads Lovecaft’s earlier story “The Hound,” and surely his voice is just the one in which Lovecraft fans would want to hear spoken, for the very first time in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, the name of the Necronomicon.

Be sure to explore out collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

via Dangerous Minds

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Library of Congress Wants You to Help Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Poems & Letters: Almost 4000 Unpublished Documents Are Waiting

in Libraries, Literature, Poetry | March 2nd, 2020

Every once in a while, a prominent artist will offer the advice that you should quit your day job and never look back. In some fields, this may be possible, though it’s becoming increasingly difficult these days, which may explain the reception Brian Eno gets when he tells art school students “not to have a job.” Eno admits, “I rarely get asked back.” In a letter to his anxious mother, Gustave Flaubert, railed against “those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night.” Such a life, he wrote, was “made for mediocre minds.”

Sure, if you can swing it, by all means, quit your job. Most poets throughout history—save the few with independent means or wealthy patrons—haven’t had the luxury. Poetry may never pay the bills, but that shouldn’t stop a poet from writing. It didn’t stop T.S. Eliot, who worked as an editor (he rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm) and a bank clerk (he turned down a fellowship from the Bloomsbury group). It did not stop William Carlos Williams, the doctor, nor Wallace Stevens, who spent his days in the insurance game, nor Charles Bukowski, though he’d never recommend it….

Then there’s ultimate journeyman poet Walt Whitman, who left school at 11 to get a job and variously throughout his life “worked as a school teacher, printer, newspaper editor, journalist, carpenter, freelance writer, civil servant, and Union Army nurse in Washington D.C. during the Civil War,” as the Library of Congress (LOC) noted for the 200th anniversary of the poet’s 1819 birth. The LOC holds “the world’s largest Walt Whitman manuscript collection” and last year they announced a volunteer campaign to transcribe thousands of unpublished documents.

Whitman offered his own possibly dubious advice to aspiring writers—“don’t write poetry”—but he himself never stopped writing, no matter the demands of the day. He also advised, “it is a good plan for every young man or woman having literary aspirations to carry a pencil and a piece of paper and constantly jot down striking events in daily life. They thus acquire a vast fund of information.” Whitman’s “jottings” include typed and handwritten letters, original copies of poems, drafts of essays and reviews, and more.

His prose is always lively and robust, full of exhortations, exaltations, and admixtures of the high literary language and casual talk of city streets that were his hallmark. Witness the wild swings in tone in his brief letter to Abraham P. Leech (above) circa 1881:

Friend Leech,

How d’ye do? — I have quite a hankering to hear from and see Jamaica, and the Jamaicaites. — A pressure of business only, has prevented my coming out among the “friends of yore” and the familiar places which your village contains. –I was an hour in your village the other day, but did not have time to come up and see you,–I think of coming up in the course of the winter holidays.–Farewell–and don’t forget write to me, through the P.O. May your kind angel hover in the invisible air, and lose sight of your blessed presence never.

Whitman

There are many, many more such documents remaining to be transcribed among the close to 4000 in the LoC’s digitized Whitman collection. “More than half of those have been completed so far,” writes Mental Floss, and roughly 1860 transcriptions still need to be reviewed. Anyone can read the documents that need approval and officially add them to the Whitman archive.” This is a very worthy project, and it may or may not feel like work to volunteer your time deciphering, reading, and transcribing Whitman’s ebullient hand.

The question may still remain: How did Whitman acquire the physical and mental stamina to get so much excellent writing done and still hold down steady gigs to make the rent? Perhaps a series of guides called “Manly Health and Training” that he wrote between 1858 and 1860 hold a clue. The poet recommends routine trips to the “gymnasium” and a diet of meat, “to the exclusion of all else.” For those “students, clerks” and others “in sedentary and mental employments”—including the “literary man”—he has one word: “Up!”

As with all such pieces of advice, results may vary. Enter the two huge manuscript archives—“Miscellaneous” and “Poetry”—at the Library of Congress digital collections and peruse, or transcribe, as much of Whitman’s endless stream of writing as you like.

via Mental Floss

Walt Whitman Gives Advice to Aspiring Young Writers: “Don’t Write Poetry” & Other Practical Tips (1888)

Walt Whitman’s Poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” Brought to Life in Three Animations

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Free: Read the Original 23,000-Word Essay That Became Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

in Books, Literature | February 28th, 2020

Because my story was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our journey to be made absolutely clear.

The publication history of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the story of gonzo journalism itself, a form dependent upon the unreliability of its narrator, who becomes a central character in the ostensibly real-life drama. In Thompson’s hallucinogenic tales of his travels to Las Vegas with attorney and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, the reporter went so far as to become a fictional character.

The journey began with a commission from Rolling Stone to report on the death of reporter Ruben Salazar, killed by a Los Angeles police tear gas grenade at an anti-Vietnam War protest. This trip diverted, however, to Las Vegas, where Thompson drove to report on the Mint 400 desert race for Sports Illustrated. Rather than submitting the 250-word piece the magazine requested, he gave them a 2,500-word psychedelic fugue, the very beginnings of Fear and Loathing. The piece, Thompson later wrote, was “aggressively rejected.”

Instead, Jann Wenner liked what he saw enough to eventually publish it in the November 1971 issue of Rolling Stone as a 23,000-word essay bearing the title of the novel it would become, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” You can read that by-now familiarly wild account, here. In it, Thompson gave the magazine’s readers a succinct definition of his reporting style:

But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

The term defines the form as the mirror obverse of the American Dream, Thompson’s excesses no more than illicit versions of the culture he picked apart, one that produced an event like the Mint 400, “the richest off-the-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport,” he wrote, and “a fantastic spectacle….”

What were Thompson and Acosta (or Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo) doing if not holding the main event of disorganized sport in their race across the desert against their own paranoid delusions? The truths Thompson told need never have been factual—they were the outrageous truths we find in any good story, well told: about the bats—as in the famous Goya etching—swarming around the passed-out head of Reason.

Read Thompson’s original, now iconic essay here.

Read 11 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Why We Should Read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Literature | February 24th, 2020

Like many of you, I was assigned to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in junior high. (Raise your hand if you had the one with this cover). Looking back, was there a subconscious reason our teacher gave us this famous tale of a group of shipwrecked children and young teens turning into murderous savages? Were we really that bad?

Perhaps you’ve never read the book and got assigned To Kill a Mockingbird or Kes instead. Is Golding’s book still worth picking up as an adult?

For sure, yes, and this animated explainer from Jill Dash of TED-Ed hopefully will entice you do so. What it provides is what we didn’t get in school: context.

Golding had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the war, and had returned to find a post-war world where nuclear annihilation felt palpable. He was also teaching at a private school for boys. He got to wondering: are we doomed as a species to savagery? Is war inevitable?

Golding was also thinking about the popular Young Adult novels (as we now call them) of his day, because he read them to his own children. A popular trope featured young boys as castaways on a desert island who get up to all sorts of fun adventures, with a dash of British colonialism thrown in for good measure. All were riffs on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Lord of the Flies, then, is a brutal satire, reducing angelic British schoolboys to a bloodthirsty mob in very little time, while in the greater world of the novel nuclear war rages. (Having read this during the ‘80s, the nuclear background was never impressed on us students. I think I would have found the novel even more terrifying.)

It took Golding ten years to find an interested publisher, and even then it was a flop on initial release. But its reputation soon grew, helped by Peter Brook’s black-and-white film adaptation, and its pedagogical use as an allegorical tale during the Cold War. It also influenced a generation of writers. Stephen King named his fictional town Castle Rock after the kids’ fort in the novel. It also opened the door for any number of Young Adult authors to deal with dark and troubling themes.

There were also real-world examples to draw from. In the same year, 1954, as Golding’s novel appeared, Muzafer Sherif’s The Robbers Cave Experiment was published. This was non-fiction, however, detailing an experiment in which 22 middle-class white boys were set up in two groups at a deserted Oklahoma summer camp. With scientists posing as counselors, they let the groups–the Rattlers and the Eagles–sort out their own hierarchies, then set up competitions.

The psychologists watched the arms race escalate over the following days. Finally, one violent mob brawl became so sustained that the researchers were forced to step in, drag the boys apart and remove them to separate locations.

How long did it take for mere friction to escalate into a juvenile war, in an idyllic setting where everyone had plenty of food? Phase two lasted just six days from the first insult (“Fatty!”) to the final all-out brawl. Golding would have loved it.

We can see Golding’s warning everywhere in popular culture, from the back-biting and betrayals in reality shows like Survivor to horror movies like The Purge. We’ve also seen the terrors that children can inflict on each other, Columbine school shooting onward. In Golding’s novel, the children are rescued and revert back to a sobbing, dependent state. In the real world, alas, nobody’s coming to save us.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hunter Thompson Died 15 Years Ago: Hear Him Remembered by Tom Wolfe, Johnny Depp, Ralph Steadman, and Others

in Literature | February 21st, 2020

Hunter S. Thompson died on February 20, 2005, fifteen years ago, and ever since we’ve been wondering aloud what he would make of the state of the world today. Though events have all but cried out for another Thompson to savagely describe and even more savagely ridicule them, what other writer could live up to the formidable standard Thompson set with Hell’s Angels, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and his other harrowing gonzo-journalistic views of the American scene? These works, as the late Tom Wolfe puts it in the interview clip above, made Thompson “the great comic writer of the twentieth century.”

Like anyone who knew the man, Wolfe had Hunter Thompson stories. The one he tells here takes place in Aspen, Colorado, years after Thompson ran for sheriff there and nearly won. As soon as Thompson and Wolfe were seated at a local restaurant, Thompson ordered four banana daiquiris and four banana splits.

After consuming all that, he called the waitress back: “Do it again.” This may remind fans of a more gluttonous version of the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo threateningly demand an entire pie at a diner. The real-life Thompson also had voracious appetites, not just for junk food and intoxicants but also for destruction, as evidenced by the story of propane-tank target practice Johnny Depp tells above.

Depp, who played Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also bonded with the writer in ways not involving eighty-foot fireballs. Both came from Kentucky, and both admired the writing of the 1930s satirist Nathanael West. The two would read West’s work aloud to one another, and later Thompson’s own. (We’ve previously featured Depp reading the “wave speech,” Thompson’s best-known passage, here on Open Culture.) “Hunter taught me how he wanted his work read,” Depp remembers, “and if there’s anything such as a blessing, that was it.” The private Thompson may have loved American prose, but the public Thompson loved outrageous behavior. As John Cusack puts it in the clip above, “He was ready for a show that was beyond any sense of decency and went into some absurdist land that made your heads bend.”

Few had as much exposure to Th0mpson’s head-bending as Ralph Steadman, the artist whose illustrations made visible the Thompsonian “gonzo” sensibility. “Gonzo is a Portuguese word, and it means hinge,” Steadman says in the news segment above. “I guess to be gonzo is to be hinged — or unhinged.” The two first met at the 1970 Kentucky Derby, where they were meant to collaborate on a piece about the race. In the event, they did more drinking and rumor-spreading than reporting, and it all led to a moment of truth: “We looked in the mirror and there we saw the evil face: it was us, looking back at us.” The final product, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” now looks like the birth of a form Thompson and Steadman created, perfected, and quite possibly destroyed.

In the Joe Rogan Experience clip above, journalist Matt Taibbi describes Thompson’s writing thus: “He let it all hang out and just said whatever the hell he thought, and he let the chips fall where they may.” Easy though that may sound, in his best work Thompson managed to employ “the same techniques that the great fiction writers use” to craft a “four-dimensional story, but at the same time it was also journalism.” As the current occupant of Thompson’s old political-reporter job at Rolling Stone, Taibbi knows better than anyone that “most people couldn’t get away with that.” It takes “a Mark Twain-level talent to do what he did, which is to mix the ambition of great fiction with journalism” — like most of Thompson’s endeavors, “one of those don’t-try-this-at-home things.”

Johnny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards, and Very Little Makes Sense

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby

Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life

Watch Hunter S. Thompson & Ralph Steadman Head to Hollywood in a Revealing 1978 Documentary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

What’s the Function of Criticism? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #36 with Critic Noah Berlatsky

Meet the World’s First Known Author: Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Novel the Coronavirus Has Made a Bestseller Again

Hear H.P. Lovecraft Horror Stories Read by Roddy McDowall

The Library of Congress Wants You to Help Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Poems & Letters: Almost 4000 Unpublished Documents Are Waiting

Free: Read the Original 23,000-Word Essay That Became Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

Why We Should Read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: An Animated Video Makes the Case

Hunter Thompson Died 15 Years Ago: Hear Him Remembered by Tom Wolfe, Johnny Depp, Ralph Steadman, and Others

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