Like Wild Turkey into the Good Doc’s mouth, so too go tomes about Hunter S. Thompson on the bookshelves.

The most recent disciple to weigh in is William McKeen, a friend of Thompson’s.

I am clinically obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson. The man and the myth.

But mostly the writing.

So it is with slight fear of being labeled a poseur that I frequently don aviator sunglasses and a red Las Vegas visor. It is with a smirking pride that my neighbors start calling me “Hunter” when I’m out on the balcony howling at the moon in aforementioned accoutrement and a t-shirt that reads, “Fuck Ya’ll I’m From Texas.”

But such fears are unfounded, unmerited, and unfair. HST gleamed his infamous cigarette holder from FDR. Bob Dylan imitated Woody Guthrie. These facts alone exonerate my behavior.

But more importantly, I consistently encounter people who are inexplicably unaware of who Hunter S. Thompson is. And this in the post-Deppized world that we live in.

So I will continue to be a manic imitator and proponent of Thompson.

And I will most assuredly read Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson.

Not to be confused with Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson.

Or Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson.

Or The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Or whatever the next one will be.

Posted by: James on August 18th, 2008 at 2:57 pm

Filed under: Books, HST
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I have a belligerent faith in books because they provide an extended, crafted argument in a world increasingly dominated by passing headlines, talking points, blurbs, pundits, scandal, and hype.

In many major news stories affecting our lives, books have become the final say.

So it was with distinct pleasure that I found myself reading Pamela Druckerman’s Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee when John Edwards admitted to having an affair. If only I had picked it up during the Spitzer Scandal! Clinton! Kobe! It’s so applicable!

When the shit first hits the fan or when the dust finally settles, books are there to provide a welcome breath of analyzed, reasoned lore.

For her anthropological romp on infidelity, Druckerman discusses the cheating lives of citizens in America, France, Russia, Japan, Africa, and China, weaving statistics with anecdotal research with the casual ease of a smart, interesting friend after two glasses of wine. It’s all very interesting, as captivating as a light, breezy travelogue as we visit Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and polygamist Muslims in Indonesia.

While hard facts on infidelity are inherently difficult to obtain, this much emerges: Americans, the British, and the French are, despite the scandals and the railing of puritanical moralists, decidedly chaste; Russians and Africans, however, much less so.

The politics of professional sport’s sexual culture and the (in booming voice) “marriage industrial complex” both seemed so interesting as to warrant their own books.

The next time a sex scandal breaks, say, a professional athlete is found cheating with some random girl he just met, remember Max Clifford, the publicist who explains how young girls go to clubs with targets and call his office so as to determine which john would garner the highest compensation in exchange for a “story” with said individual.

And in a real coup, Authwhore has received its most prestigious endorsement yet. A 1950’s Ladies Home Journal “advised its readers that the way to hold on to a husband isn’t to lose weight and buy new lingerie, it’s to ‘read, read, read! And then talk about books, articles, movies, and news together…’”

That’s right. Because Reading is Sexy.

Look for the Authwhore diet books next Spring.

Posted by: James on August 15th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Filed under: Books, Reviews
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A new study by researchers reveals that emotions are affected in exactly the same way, regardless of whether you are reading or watching TV.

This is good and bad news.

Good news for us sensible folk dismayed by the puritans blaming society’s ills on Grand Theft Auto and the like.

Bad news for us sensible folk bothered by the puritans railing against books and campaigning to have them banned.

But of course, there are some fine lines to be distinguished in all of this. Books, nor television, is a monolithic medium to be generalized en masse. I have quite a different experience watching Wipeout or America’s Funniest Videos than I do Jeopardy or Seinfeld or 8 1/2. Same goes for reading Zadie Smith or Hunter S. Thompson versus reading someone like Michael Crichton.

But one thing is sure that I wish the study would have explored to verify my lifetime thesis: Reading is Sexy.

Sexier than the boob tube for sure.

Posted by: James on August 14th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

Filed under: Books, news
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Michael Chabon won the “best novel” category of science fiction’s most prestigious awards for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

The Hugo Awards are Authwhore’s favorite literary awards.

And not because we’re closeted sci-fi-loving, graphic novel-reading nerds. Authwhore is just uniquely situated to singularly appreciate any award that prominently features a bright, shiny phallus:

The Hugo Award trophies vary year to year but always feature the finned Hugo rocket (also known in literary works as a penis (dildo, vibrator are also acceptable interpretations)).

Except for 1958. Something very unfortunate clearly happened in 1958 and rendered the science fiction community void of sexual impulse and creative drive:

What happened in 1958?!?!?!???

Posted by: James on August 12th, 2008 at 5:58 am

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In gearing up for Banned Books Week, September 27 - October 4, 2008, I am trying to decide which banned book to read. My right to read isn’t going to celebrate itself.

We all love a good list. Especially a list of books we’re supposed to have read. We scour these lists, smirking in satisfaction at the ones we have actually read, and making mental notes of the ones we think we ought to read.

A list of banned books provides all the things we love about book lists and more. There is something very illuminating about a culture’s puritan biases based on the ill it harbors for certain books.

So which one(s) do I read?

Some books are more obviously likely to raise the ire of certain citizens, like The Homo Handbook-Getting in Touch With Your Inner Homo. And some are a little more peculiarly controversial, like Forever by Judy Blume.

Judy Blume! I actually have a lot more respect for Judy Blume now. Way to go, Judy, getting a book banned. Alright.

Now, most of the banned books on the list seem to be “one of 55 books that parents in Fayetteville, Arkansas are petitioning to have removed from school libraries. The parents, who formed Parents Protecting the Minds of Children, object to the profane language and depictions of sexuality in many of the books and have accused the librarians and other opponents of their efforts of promoting a “homosexual agenda”.

So yeah. We have a small, vocal group in a single community seeking a narrow agenda. Which is their prerogative of course. But it doesn’t indicate that we are on the brink of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. I don’t think I’d want How to Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson displayed too prominently around my ankle biters either. Even if it is a “cautionary tale.”

So which one to read? There are a few surprising ones on the list to be sure.

Bringing Down the House?

All the Pretty Horses?

Barbara Kingsolver?

I think I’m going to play it safe and go with Bless Me, Ultima. It comes with a fabulous story:

“High school students in Norwood, Colorado, staged an all-day sit-in to protest the removal of the novel from a ninth grade English classroom. The book had been removed following parent complaints of profanity and “pagan content” (the book’s title character is an herbal healer). Bob Conder, superintendent of schools, confiscated two dozen copies of the novel and threw them in trash cans, then allowed a group of parents to retrieve the books and destroy them. Conder later apologized, admitting he had never read the novel, which appears on First Lady Laura Bush’s “top ten” reading list for all ages.”

Posted by: James on August 11th, 2008 at 6:30 am

Filed under: Books, news
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Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation is what would happen if David Sedaris wrote The Devil in the White City.

Now I know that we’re supposed to lump the likes of David Rakoff, Sarah Vowell, and David Sedaris into a category of humor or essays or some other less-than-serious class, but Assassination Vacation is an important book.

And I mean that in the traditional, classic sense. So I’ll say it again. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell is an important book.

AV belongs up on the eye-level shelf or right on the nightstand with all the other tattered, well-read, really good paperbacks like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc, etc, et al.

You see, Vowell embarks on an adventure to satisfy a macabre personal fascination with presidential assassinations, but does so with a grace and wit and piercing intellect that reveals an entertainingly enormous amount of relevant US history. Her book is equal parts well written, informative, and funny. While she’ll gently remind us that the dedication of Lincoln’s Memorial in 1922 was segregated, and that our use of the “water cure” during the Spanish-American War predated our current use of “water boarding,” she’ll also describe the McKinley National Memorial in Canton as “a gray granite nipple on a fresh green breast of grass.”

Sarah Vowell should write and edit textbooks. Our schoolchildren would be smarter, and our country a lot better off. And I mean that. Sarah, please edit high school textbooks. You could single handedly eliminate Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

But whether you have ADHD or not, you’ll find Assassination Vacation a damn readable brew of dry humor and understated intelligence that makes important slivers of our country’s history relevant, approachable, understandable, worth knowing, and most of all, entertaining.

Posted by: James on August 6th, 2008 at 4:28 pm

Filed under: Books, Politics, Reviews
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Barnes & Noble and Borders are the new Time and Newsweek. The new GM and Ford. The new George W. Bush and John Kerry.

These images greeted me in a recent email from Borders:

And these images greeted me in a recent email from Barnes & Noble:

Wow. How does one decide between Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling?

Posted by: James on August 1st, 2008 at 12:33 pm

Filed under: Books
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In his essay on Franz Kafka in the infinitely special Cultural Amnesia, Clive James recommends that, “The best way to approach Kafka is probably just to plunge into The Castle and get lost. Getting lost and staying lost is the whole idea of the book, and a matchless symbol for how, according to Kafka, we really feel underneath, when we momentarily convince ourselves that we know what’s going on, while still suspecting that the momentary conviction might be part of the deception.”

I took Clive’s advice and got lost.

I really like The Castle. But in the way that you like some books without having anything intelligent to say about them. You just like them. (I feel this way about The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye.)

Reading The Castle was like watching a really weird, exotic-but-not-necessarily-pretty flower bloom very slowly. And even after it has blossomed, wilted, and blown away in a shivering breeze, you’re still not sure what exactly you saw happen. Was it a sunrise or a car crash? Regardless, watching it was certainly an interesting, visceral experience.

In regards to The Castle’s bizarre, otherworldly world, The Critic Establishment is left to describe it as “enigmatic” and “dark” and “haunting” and “brooding.”

I think what they mean is what I call weird. The Castle is weird. It takes you to a strange place full of strange people saying things strangely. So it’s rather intriguing in that way. “What the hell is going on here?” is a reader’s predominant question while reading it. But alas, Kafka left it unfinished upon his death, even leaving it mid-sentence.

But there is now the outside chance of resolving the incomplete matter with the death of Max Brod’s secretary who had been hoarding Kafka’s papers.

I rather like The Castle the way it is. It’s my opinion that things are best when

Posted by: James on August 1st, 2008 at 6:12 am

Filed under: Books, Reviews
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“I never wash my hands after taking a leak. That’s the cleanest part of me.” – H.L. Mencken.

H.L. Mencken was Hunter S. Thompson before Hunter S. Thompson was Hunter S. Thompson.

In fact, I decided to look into this H.L. character upon coming across a passing comment referring to him in Gonzo. HST was a fan. Well, perhaps not a fan, but certainly aware of him, aware of Mencken’s contribution to American letters and therefore an influence and forefather of Thompson’s own potent prose and inimitable personality.

H. L. Mencken paved the road that Hunter S. Thompson came screaming down with his peyote-fueled typewriter of rage and style.

These two men, forefathers of modern journalism, have a lot in common and their similarities illuminate the world they were a part of and criticized so effectively. They were both journalists, columnists, and editors, fierce critics of culture and politics.

As Teachout shares in The Skeptic, “Mencken responded to Prohibition by selling his car and using the proceeds to purchase a large stock of “the best wines and liquors I could find,” stored in a homemade basement vault whose door bore a custom-painted sign emblazoned with a skull and crossbones: “This vault is protected by a device releasing Chlorine Gas under 200 pounds pressure. Enter it at your own Risk.” HST would have been proud.

H.L. Mencken gained widespread popularity and exposure with the infamous Scopes trial and HST gained notoriety while covering the ’72 Presidential Campaign. Both men’s success was intimately tied with magazines.

“I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine,” Mencken wrote to William Saroyan in 1936. “I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to Hell and learn from other editors how dreadful their job was on earth.”

And as all great men seem to be, both H.L. Mencken and Hunter S. Thompson were flawed. Mencken was an anti-Semite and Thompson a homophobe.

However useful an introduction to H.L. Mencken Teachout’s biography was, I did find it significantly lacking in two particular arenas.

First of all, it failed to share an adequate amount of Mencken’s own prose. Once the myth and drug-fascination with Hunter S. Thompson has waned, his legacy will be his words. And no matter how intriguing of a character Mencken was in his own right, his heritage seems to be the same. So I wanted more of Mencken’s writing.

Second, Mencken was an important American writer who had a significant influence on modern journalism and I wish Teachout had provided more of an analysis and study of Mencken’s lasting presence in our contemporary era. The closest Teachout got was a mere parenthetical aside: “Had they [conservatives] known of the extent to which his [Mencken] work in the twenties helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the America-hating adversary culture of the sixties, they might have repudiated him altogether.” But this second objection is probably more a manifestation of my own bias and interest in the similarities between Mencken and Thompson.

Though each man harbored intense and undeniable prejudices of the first order, they pursued sham and hypocrisy in all arenas of public life with unflagging diligence. But Mencken, faithfully secular, touched on religion too, which I haven’t come across much by HST on the topic. Did he weigh in on religion ever?

At the end of The Skeptic, Teachout sees in Mencken “a skepticism so extreme as to issue in philosophical incoherence.” But Teachout ultimately concludes that Mencken’s relevance and success is not a function of his particular convictions but rather of “the firmly balanced prose rhythms and vigorous diction in which they are couched. It is, in short, a triumph of style.”

The same can be said of HST. Despite HST’s failure to write that great novel, or to extend his initial success any further than the 70s, he lined up words in an order like no one else did. And for that, The Skeptic must be considered a success in that it makes me want to stop reading criticism and biographies of Mencken and instead turn to his books much in the same way that I was wearied by Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise and instead wanted to listen to the music.

As always, it’s best to shut up and listen.

Posted by: James on July 28th, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Filed under: Books, HST, Reviews, Writers
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MW by Osamu Tezuka is a thoroughly entertaining graphic novel. I just finished it and found it to be quite, quite enjoyable.

Soon after setting down MW, I picked up Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. So I do not yet have an adequate framework to be much more articulate and informed about how and why MW is so good. Yes, I am that confident in Reading Comics that after absorbing its content, I will be forever eloquent and wise on the topic of comic criticism. Even though I have read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which Reading Comics has already taken issue with on a few finer points of comic lore and craft. So it’s sure to be an enjoyable read of comic nerd in-fighting.

How’s that for establishing your form as a legitimate medium? Splinter into competing sects of disagreeing “experts” and engage in petty and nonconstructive debates. Now that’s a classy, established medium! If only we could get Chris Ware and Alan Moore to engage in a widely publicized tiff, a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Then you comic-kazes would know you’ve really arrived.

But back to MW. It’s good. It is.

And don’t just take my word for it. According to the flap copy, Osamu Tezuka is a comic god, the godfather of Japanese manga comics, who spurned his doctor’s degree to pursue the then-considered “frivolous medium” of comics.

The protagonist of MW is a scion of a famous Kabuki family. There’s a secret military cover-up. Finance. Politics. Murder. Rape. WMDs. A public prosecutor. A Catholic priest. And homoeroticism. Don’t forget the homoeroticism. You know how those graphic novelists revel in good old-fashioned sexual obsession.

If you’re looking for even more elements of intrigue combined in a single graphic novel of “sweeping vision, deftly intertwined plots, and indefatigable commitment to human dignity,” I think you’re asking too much. But there’s probably a comic out there for you. Keep looking.

Try starting with Battle Pope.

If one reads McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Wolk’s Reading Comics, The New Yorker’s comics issue, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern all-comics issue 13 edited by Chris Ware, Michael Chabon’s championing of the medium, or even the Best American Comics series, you will be amazed at the indefatigable lengths guardians and cheerleaders of the form go to in order to establish comics as anything but a “frivolous medium.”

Not to discredit the admirable and necessary actions that have thankfully lifted comics out of the doldrums brought on by a prejudice of childish obscurity and pretentious elitism, to me the debate has already been won. Comics are without a doubt, a legitimate artistic craft worthy of serious reading, and as novels go the way of five act plays in iambic pentameter, comics will burgeon into a significantly dominate form of published entertainment. Turn a couple of these graphic novels into video games, and boom, look out Hollywood. Brilliantly talented nerds: 1. Naysayers: 0.

But this leaves me to ponder what fringe form will next emerge to demand the acknowledgment and serious criticism its proponent’s feel it so urgently deserves?

I’ve already mentioned one: video games?
Graffiti?
Tattoos?
Fake memoirs?

I personally want there to be an annual competition for the finest fake memoir awarded to the autobiography that best duped the general public and publishing industry into believing that it was absolutely true. Authors will keep their lips sealed until the submission process in which they can then discreetly admit that, “Oh yeah, I made that all up. Hehe. Clever me.” They could call the competition The Big Get and it could be a legitimate genre that authors set out to execute instead of a highly embarrassing mistake.

Posted by: James on July 21st, 2008 at 5:45 pm

Filed under: Books, Graphic Novels, Reviews
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