The Legacy of the Original Fallout Boy Shines On..

Regarding my previous article: I’m both impressed and shocked by Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to step out of the upcoming elections in Zimbabwe. As a powerful volte-face his course of action is comparable to Richard Nixon’s sudden resignation from his presidency in 1974. Facing impeachment and, many thought, inevitable conviction following the accusations levelled by the Watergate scandal Nixon’s sudden deflationary tactic meant that he could no longer face trial as he formally stepped down from the legally vulnerable position needed to carry out the prosecution process. Thereby allowing him to make the famous claim “I have never been acquitted” because he literally removed himself from the line of fire. Morgan Tsvangirai’s choice of tack is equally ingenious.

Without meaning to trivialise the matter, or to compare him too closely with the odious Nixon, Tsvangirai has done a great thing, both politically and from an ethical standpoint. Whereas Nixon could have righteously been accused of weaseling out of his predicament, Tsvangirai has made what you might call a courageous retreat. Faced with the numerous assassinations and rising intimidation of his fellow party members, the atrocities carried out against the Zimbabwean voters, and the fact that even by winning the election he would in some respect end up losing overall, Tsvangirai has attempted to quell Mugabe’s reign of violence. In doing he has also announced a highly provocative j’accuse that was already on everyone’s lips, perhaps also a subtle dig at the international community who are too complacently avowed to fight the wrong battles, in the wrong countries, which should bring greater pressure to bear on the horrific regime Zimbabwe is forced to suffer.

Now that Mugabe will win his election Tsvangirai has certainly put the ball in the opposition’s court. It is with a weak sense of optimism that I hope in gaining this hollow victory by his own dirty bloody ways, Mugabe will now stand under the crosshairs of the world, and that their aim will come to bear. Leaving Mugabe to face the realisation that almost all dictators will at some pointed in their jilted “career” succeed in hanging themselves if only by the testimony of their own actions.

Pretty in Print

How many newspapers do you buy? On average my surrogate university family would purchase a Guardian (the most lefty of the UK newspapers) every couple of days, always getting the weekend issues so each member of the household could enjoy the glossy but shallow supplements they felt best represented them and their “lifestyle choices”. We stick loyally to our news brand, often without fully understanding why. I imagine its through some faint sense of belonging to a readership made up mostly of current and ex-university students, some trying to get a life, others trying to relive one, old habits dying hard.

My parents read the Daily Mail (a red-top in sheep’s clothing) another “lifestyle choice” I can’t quite understand, both of them being ex-university students. However I believe they both voted labour so perhaps that explains it. But regardless of the Mail’s dubious claims I respect their right to buy it and even their attempt to read it, despite the fact its’ reputation is at best, much derided. Discussing with much astonishment Prince’s decision to give away his latest album for free with the paper, a certain music critic for the Independent on Sunday once brilliantly referred to the paper as ‘Fascism in a cardigan”

All this pondering led me to conduct a kind of aesthetic experiment. Having a discussion with one of my former flatmates, Colonel Shaughan, currently in exile somewhere in Europe (debating competition) in which he sagely pointed out to me the differences between the appearance of the two newspapers (in doing so highlighting the age old content debate between the tabloids and broadsheets, the Guardian being something of mid-size broadsheet) Semi-intrigued, I went out on a brief recce and purchased today’s copy of each paper in order to strike a concrete comparison.

The best way to start, I feel, is in the classical fashion of our morning BBC news reports, by comparing the day’s main headlines; this gives a strong indication of both the overall vision of the paper, what they feel is the most burning current issue, and the sort of topics they feel to be more newsworthy in general. For example:

The Guardian said:

(subtitle in brackets)

‘Mugabe has declared war and we will not be part of that war’

(Tsvangirai withdraws his party from election saying to continue would cost supporters’ lives)

The Daily mail said:

FEAR FOR GIRLS AS THE PILL IS SOLD ONLINE

(Contraceptives available on official website)

Before I go scratching too deeply beneath the surface, as to the content of the respective headlines, fascinating as the divergence is, I want to briefly mention the way the pages look. Both feature a “free” item, (v.f.m for tight middle England) The Guardian has a “Great Songwriters” booklet on Morrissey, the Daily Mail an ancient Michael Caine film, both dubious choices when viewed under different critical lights. The main picture on The Guardian is of a torn poster featuring Morgan Tsvangirai, to represent his loss in voter support and his subsequent stepdown from the electoral process in Zimbabwe. The Mail has a tall picture of the Tennis player, Maria Sharapova, with a caption commenting on her decision to wear shorts at Wimbledon, not the usual skirts expected of female players, so “admirers” will be unable to fully appreciate her “shapely legs”.

So, there is a vital difference between the two papers already, whilst the Guardian ably chooses a picture that in some way represents the essence of their headline, the main story of the paper, The Mail has a completely unrelated picture of a Tennis player that could be viewed as a bit sexist/shallow, depending upon your own persuasion. Unless Miss Sharapova were actually on the pill and was getting it for free from a UK website I can’t see any reason for her, or her legs, to be anywhere near the front page of a national(ist) newspaper, because she has no bearing on the headline, whatsoever.

You could easily argue with me and claim that the picture on the front doesn’t have to be representative in any way of the main article etc. To an extent I would agree with this, it is primarily an aesthetic choice, but what a choice the Mail made! It makes a lot of sense to attempt at some synthesis between words and pictures if only to better communicate the intent of the article, to overall reflect the spirit of the times.

The Guardian’s picture of ripped apart Tsvangirai suggests desperation and a sense of loss at his (ultimately forced) withdrawal from the Zimbabwe elections, a quiet death for democracy in a country where cries for foreign intervention continue to go almost completely unheeded. This is journalism intended to educate and inspire, to raise awareness of human suffering and need.

By comparison the picture of Sharapova is another example of limp totty for middle-aged execs (apologies Ms.) which gives me nothing (certainly not an erection) about the story of free contraception being made more widely available for a younger, more computer literate generation, not an especially well represented demographic in the hallowed pages of the Mail.

Now onto the headlines themselves; The Guardian has a quote from Morgan Tsvangirai, the (former) leader of the political opposition to Robert Mugabe. Whilst this isn’t terribly original, being a quote and therefore not strictly written by the journalist themselves, it is probably the most newsworthy thing to be reported today, there is a common consensus behind this in the fact that most of today’s papers featured a similar headline, certainly, almost all of the nationals focused on this issue. The Daily Mail, on the other hand, put it on page 6, with a real big picture to fill up the space.

The Guardian’s headline is neat and to the point, as is the Mail’s, but moving beyond appearance and into the “realm of ideas” the Guardian’s headline at least contains some information about a specific situation. By comparison the Mail’s headline, warning us, once again, with foreboding and gloom, of the latest social threat to this great nation of ours (this time it’s free contraception). This is clearly emphasised in their frankly gigantic big bold lettering written in CAPITAL letters leaving barely any room for actual content, that is; meaningful information you can take home with you (after reading some Guardian articles I feel compelled to spill my statistical guts to anyone who can be made to listen). Although big writing is much easier to read so that’s a bonus.

The main problem, however, with the Daily Mail’s headline is not just its vulgar appearance but its dumb content. Not even the subtitle tells me who or what company is offering the pill over the internet so as a Whitehouse loyalist I don’t even know who to deride or protest against. The fact that the Mail waste so much space cramming in the epic and yet vague headline leaving little room for the article itself (it is crammed into flat, page-wide “columns”) suggests both a lack of ideas, but more importantly a dangerous habit toward sloganeering. As shown with the Sun and the other tabloids, bulls may not see red but humans seem positively magnetised toward it. And very much like the bull they seem doomed to follow its every flutter. If a tabloid paper gives you a thick black headline tarring the latest individual or organisation then it follows that I have no real need to read the one paragraph article, all I need to do is accept what I’m reading prima facie, and follow the red paedo trail all the way to the court/gallows and some kind of justice will be done, one way or the other.

My point being, if you print inflammatory, not informative headlines, then yes you will get a reaction, but it won’t necessarily be the “right” one, or at least a deserved one. Just because a headline is provocative it does not dictate that someone will buy the paper and read the article no matter how good it is, papers on newsstands are all competing for attention so they have to be eye-catching and interesting, that’s partly how the industry works, I’m just not sure if that’s all it should be, as in the case of the Mail. Reactionary words, even if they don’t lead to action, almost always have consequences.

In closing, I can’t see the point in newspapers that only tell half the story. Its good to warn or advise people of things that they might not know about, or to point out interesting cultural trends or situations (such as the difference between good newspapers and bad ones) but to my mind the main reason to have a free press is to inform and to raise opinion and debate, but not to do so in a way that causes harms to others, and create problems or issues out of nothing. When people keep looking for fires where they think they see smoke, they begin to start fires of their own.

N.B. Due to geographical limitations, and borders restrained by national pride, the issues featured in today’s paper refer to the “Scottish” Daily Mail, which I’m sure is just as good as its southern bastard cousin.

P.S. Kudos to Colonel Shaughan for his Buddha-like temperance and wilful ideas.

When, at last, your work is done…

Having just spent a good hour and a bit trying to clean my oven and other nefarious parts of our slum-like kitchen I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I was doing here. In a week I’ll be evacuating from my current domicile, the typical student-filth soaked flat and moving to more consistently hygienic surroundings, namely the middle class nest of my parent’s house. I’m cleaning for a number of reasons, partly in time for my “rents” arrival to conduct the big move, to salvage as much of my deposit from my landlord as I’m constantly reminded of the tea bag stains I’ve made on the walls and ceilings, and lastly through a personal sense of shame that is driving me madder with loathing each and every day I pass in solitude.

I got to thinking with my head in the oven (the gas was off, although it was tempting) how well should I clean this particular white appliance? One of my flatmates has already moved into a new flat shared with his long-term girlfriend and has a great deal of domestic bliss/hell awaiting him, the other has deserted me on a three week tour of Europe, taking in the mixed delights of London, Estonia, and Copenhagen, which leaves just me waiting to descend further into half-insanity and boredom.

Faced with the choice between flat cleaning, if only for better health, and getting on with my CV and covering letters for job applications. I leapt at the chance to clean something, swapping one highly potent boring chore for another. So here I was, in my oven speculating as to how much of it I should clean, and what standard of hygiene I should seek to attain for my efforts, in what felt like a task almost worthy of Sisyphus; forever rolling boulders up the mountain face. Without going into too much graphic detail I knew the oven would take ages to clean “properly” and is epic in scale if you let it get on top of you. The hinges were gunked up with gunk, dust, and disease. The glass of the door had that faint brown trickling grease that seems a particularly nasty form of chip fat rain. The floor of the main oven was thick like the Somme with black and brown crud that I had to remove with a metal spatula like scraping wallpaper but twice as hard and ever so fiddly when done in the dark of a big square box. For a while I felt like this my destined end, I’d found my tomb and now all I had to do was settle in and make the best of it for the next thousand years but I knew the dust mites and other assorted beetles would devour me long before then.

What was hard to decide was what I should clean first, and how hard. Some of the stuff just wouldn’t come off and I could only guess that it was eternal muck sent from Heaven. It wasn’t as if I badly qualified or ill-equipped, I had my trusty sponge, spatula, and Mr. Muscle™ (I was even wearing the official uniform of white vest) but some of it just wouldn’t budge. I also resigned myself to knowing that eventually it would all get dirty again. Inevitably as soon as I tried to cook some Instant Noodles or some other form of virulent anti-food I would lose a few strands over the edge and the blue light of the gas ring would in seconds burn them to a crisp and solidify them like a line in the mountain scape of the hob. Perhaps it was the gas fumes or the intensely hallucinogenic qualities of assorted cleaning fluids but this realisation that we never stop cleaning gave everything I was trying so hard to do a powerful sense of futility, of being beaten when I had only just begun, so young and already drowned in the mixed waves of despair and charred onion slivers. Nothing would ever be clean again.

If you look closely enough nothing is ever as clean as it should be, and it never can be. People are always keen to criticise NHS housekeeping staff (cleaners, to you) for the spread of C.diff and other such “superbugs” without realising that the staff clean everything, and then clean it again, all the time. The pressure put upon the underrated, barely over minimum wage, staff is immense and they only have so many hours in the day to do their job, and two hands to do it with. My point is apart from aseptic pre-packaged syringes, or airtight rooms the possibility of absolute cleanliness really is very much next to Godliness in their shared status of pure mythology, like chastity we can aspire to great heights of overcoming nature, but all too often, being human, people will fall from the horse.

Another strange aspect of this situation is the double life some people lead in their jobs and private lives. It was a always strange for me whilst at sixth form college going out to dinner and being waited upon, my current job at the time being a kind of employment as a kitchen potwashing facilitator, sitting there knowing that behind the ridiculous double saloon type doors there was another young guy or girl just like me having to go through the awful degrading motions of sweeping and wiping away other peoples filth; spittle mixed with sauce, chewed up gristle, bones picked clean by greedy fingers, another Orwell from his Paris years slaving away at someone else’s pleasure. This reversal of the assigned roles struck me as being quite surreal, and served as a distinct reminder that I was working the next day, and before I went to work I would have to wash up my dinner plates at home first. As with the hospital cleaners who spend all day cleaning and bleaching wards suffering cracked whitened hands and breathing in chemical fumes that to the lungs feel something like sulphur, they get to go home, feed their kids and then clean their own home, then get up early next morning and do the whole thing all over again.

The Mugabe Custom Pistol, lets hope he uses it.

Fargo. This time for real, eh.

How many feet must a man lose/Before you can call him murdered?

I think two.

Orwell Obscura

Orwell survives in Spain, but in the oddest way...

While I’m like Mrs Dalloway

Another morning, waking up, still “half-cut” as they say, it suddenly occurred to me that I have a great deal in common with the eponymous heroine of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Having just graduated from university at the tender age of two and twenty I find myself jobless and complacent. Like many unemployed persons I have a lot of spare time on my hands, much like Mrs Dalloway. But what I find most interesting about our situation is how each of us chooses to spend all this free time, and how we might spend it better.

The heroine of the novel; Clarissa Dalloway, was purely a creation of Virginia Woolf’s mind and I’m a real person but it still seems that for both of us the purpose of our respective existence remains largely unwritten. We both fritter away our time on somewhat trivial matters designed to keep ourselves busy, for lack of a singular vocation that might channel our time more effectively.

The novel begins with Mrs Dalloway’s decision to “buy the flowers herself” and so she enters into the busy streets of London and dreamwalks basking in the glow of other people with lives she feels must be much richer than her own. She is famous for her great parties and keen socialising but it is something of a front. In order to while away the hours that make up her life, to quieten her deep sense of dissatisfaction Clarissa does her best to speed up the slow drip of time and thus make her life faster, a whirl of busy engagements and trivial matters blown out of proportion by the intense force of her stream-of-conscious monologue. The exact nature of her sadness is hard to pin down to just one particular cause but it is clear that she is unable to live in pure silence as she is often too busy running away from her own reflection, terrified by the truth that her life is somehow incomplete.

The other lead character in the novel is Septimus, whose story runs loosely alongside that of Mrs Dalloway’s, briefly intersecting toward the end of the book. His own struggle with life echoes the harsh sterility of Mrs. Dalloway’s, his maddening shattered memories of the First World War trenches endless pounding of the heavy guns cause him both detachment, and a rising fear of reality. As he descends further into insanity it becomes harder for him to disseminate experience the world as it really is, everywhere he hears and sees the signs of the war, until his entire vision becomes one continually blurred state.

There is a contrast between them in the way Mrs Dalloway actively seeks out noise, movement, hustle and bustle. She loves London, simply through being there, she engages, perhaps too deeply, in living for the moment. Often, for example, beginning fleeting discussions with party guests about whom she knows all the latest news but cannot bring herself to care about enough, so she moves on from one to the next, never quite settling in one place for to long.

As a result of their conditions both characters find themselves unable to fully engage in love; Clarissa because she is constantly apart from the one man she truly desires, Peter, and Septimus because his psyche is far too damaged and self-absorbed to meet the level of emotional investment that love requires. Both characters are so caught up in themselves the outside world is something of a violent intrusion to their way of life, a distraction and also an abstraction from their private chamber of thoughts.

Clarissa Dalloway is lost in a peculiar fashion. She’s like a moth in a darkened room, with four candles equally spaced apart. She wanders aimlessly in the centre drowning in voices that speak to her but say nothing. Lacking guidance Mrs. Dalloway can make no defining choices in her life, not only that she can find no choices worth making. Her life is marked as a felicitous wandering, building nothing, just existing but without knowing why.

We can draw a parallel between Mrs. Dalloway’s condition, a fear of silence and unchallenged free introspection, with a more modern pre-occupation that comes from living in a digital age. Where Mrs. Dalloway blinds herself to certain truths of her position, married but only half in love, never truly restful, always seeking noise and the violence of flux, the kids of the supposed “Generation-Y” (a loathsome term) have the wonders of modern things to do, or rather to sit around, to watch and listen but without much engagement. In my current state of unemployment I find myself heavily steeped in these electronica activities, something is always on and talking to me. I either have the radio, dreaded classic FM with its jibbering adverts that gradually seep into my prostrate sub-conscious till I know them by heart, or I’m playing GTA (running over pedestrians for three hours can’t be healthy) or I’m listening to another album full of voices and notes to decipher, or repeatedly watching old re-runs of the Simpsons. I go out, like Mrs Dalloway, my heart skips a tremulous beat as I race to Sainsbury’s to find new shiny things to buy and restock my cupboards, even though they are already full, my higher pleasure is simply the kick of spending money!

My point is that in living this way I find myself reading and doing far less than I used to, my life seems a little less meaningful. What do I mean by that? It’s better to sit and write/make music/draw/to talk things over, than to vegetate just watching which celebrity is now fat or thin or stoned or dead, or all of the above. To do something artful, whatever it might be, is a way to fill the gaps in time.

Perhaps “Generation-Y” is a generation of Mrs. Dalloways? A bored generation. We have it too easy so we get bored, throw stones, get drunk, pick fights, then we get up and do it again. This is a boring generation. The majority of us have little to say politically but we do have mass spending power, for what its worth.

In conclusion I think it’s supremely healthy to have a job, an enterprise, everyone needs a cause to fight for, a path to follow. Because in doing so we give our lives meaning, something that Mrs Dalloway and to an extent myself are sadly lacking. So in order to avoid a full transformation into the wilful self-indulgence of the damaged Mrs. Dalloway, or to be absorbed into a bored generation I don’t want to be a member of, I intend to find a job that means something to me, and in doing so escape my cocoon of apathy and emerge a career-seeking butterfly.

Vile Bodies

“I eat too much to die, And not enough to stay alive / I'm sitting in the middle waiting” – Follow me…

It recently occurred to me the other day browsing through a random assortment of girls magazines and sitting by the radio hearing of constant protest from the NHS, that a savage dichotomy is arising in the nation’s health, and what we have come to view as constituting healthy behaviour and a healthy body has changed radically. On one side we have glossy celeb-obsessed magazines that track, attack and promote celebrity, they act as the modern authority deciding when and what makes a body “hot”. On the other hand, we have governments rattling sabres with modelling agencies, B.M.I’s, and waxing lyrical about the rising tide of morbid obesity that threatens to consume us all.

Many so-called beauty magazines are notorious for pushing onto younger people stark images of both the high and low life of celebrity bodies. Some magazines, written for people on HEAT, seem to exist almost entirely to chart the ill-led lives of a great many famous persons, their only content being a drawn out biography of people in the gloriously self-contained media world, some having achieved nothing but being famous for its’ own sake, their stories are told very simply, week by week.

MORE people, especially the men/women who read these magazines, should be honest, and admit to their own sense of sick fascination. At its worst it strikes on a par with the faint titillation imagined by readers of J.G.Ballard’s Crash in which people gain deep sexual pleasure through witnessing and being involved in horrific car accidents. The damaged ones then covet pictures of the vicious wounds they receive because they seem to form a bizarre symmetry between body and technology occurring when the two, literally, collide. With the same sense of desire and loathing certain magazines document the run of surgical operations had by a celebrity, providing photo-lists of nip/tucks, face-lifts, laser cuts, bad skins, weight loss, weight gain, muscle mass, caved in chests, and carved out cheeks, and the loyal audience read with made-up smiles and revel deep in their own schadenfreude, especially when the ops go wrong and everything turns South.

The political side of the story involves the NHS who often acts pejoratively when it comes to health risks; using scare tactics to stop people killing themselves prematurely (read: to save money) A policy I agree with, to an extent. Many people don’t understand the extreme damage they’re doing to their bodies when they smoke/drink/eat too much but all too often this message is displayed in an alarmist and thus reactionary way, a la mode the celebrity magazines, which instead of providing simple information and so educating people about a healthy lifestyle, the NHS demonises lifestyles that are not deemed healthy enough, such as smoking, and so takes a slightly antagonist stance toward the people they aim to help.

This makes the NHS complicit to the same accusatory ideals of the magazines because in waving around pictures of obese people and predicting an obesity epidemic, as if you could catch it like the plague, they help to make subsequent generations afraid of putting on any amount of weight, not simply to the point of obesity. This makes it harder for people to live and eat normally, to happily accept who and what they are and so to be content with their body. Skinny people get thinner, heavy built people feel worse about not looking like the girls in the magazines, and all the while we are offered solutions and fixes to make us look “right” and so to live a life more cleanly prescribed by our most beloved media.

As a society we are moving further and further toward a universal state of acute nausea and self-loathing when we are faced with other human bodies, but most alarmingly with our own bodies. We become well-trained in envy, to idolise the latest of the airbrushed angels and thus to hold up our own physical state as an ugly kind of mirror, to be disgusted by others who are not classified as beautiful, a kind of equivalent to body-fascism.

Through narrowing the natural diversity of acceptable body types, we exert greater social pressure and force people to live under a shadow of inadequacy. The reason such body paranoia is so serious is it often turns, along with our stomachs, into something much more disconcerting, such as anorexia or bulimia. These are mental illnesses most commonly associated with a need to exert control over one’s body, to control how we appear both to ourselves and to others, often leading to a distorted self- image. Like the growth of a virus, anorexia and other eating disorders need the right conditions in which to flourish and then spread. In this case provided by governmental paranoia and media obsessions; two party lines that have much in more in common than we would normally expect. Together they act as a key trigger for eating disorders, cultivating in people an absolute fear of being fat and so not looking at one’s best, according to whatever the current ideal might be. No clearer case can be found than the story of the young Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston who in 2006 died at the age of 21 with the body weight of a 12 year old girl.

Cardiff/Coventry/Aberdeen

FutureSlums...

Send in The Specials, or the Clowns...whichever seems more appropriate.

Cash for Granite?

Sn all cshpnts wll look lk ths. And Bnksy wll own thm...

What Finally Spooked Hunter S. Hemingway?

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote a great piece of journalism, a sort of post-obituary, for Ernest Hemingway a writer he both mimicked and adored. Not too many people seem to be aware of the article “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” as Thompson’s short book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” often overshadows it on the cultural landscape, but not only is it a brilliantly observed piece about Hemingway and the place where he chose to spend, and end, his remaining days, its also highly revealing about Thompson himself.

Often typecast as an insensitive drug-crazed lefty-nut job born only to self-consciously slash and burn conservative America, attacking both the nation and its people; all those who time and time again, Hunter felt, sold his beloved country so consistently down Shit Creek, Hunter S. Thompson is poorly represented in this light (no thanks to “Fear and Loathing…”) And yet he was all of those things, but at the end of the day he was still a writer, a “real” one, not simply a “Gonzo” journalist; a role he created and then struggled to live up to for the rest of his life.

“What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” now appears after Hunter’s death as both a sensitive portrait of the older, quite damaged and seemingly embattled Hemingway retreating somewhere quiet to die, as highly prescient. In the article Thompson writes how Hemingway, having found his place in the world that he had fought so hard to carve, became quickly disillusioned when it no longer seemed as sharply defined as it had once been. His only way of reacting against most things was to write but he found his skills diminished by the new wave of the “Beat” writers, the generation that followed. And because they drew some of their inspiration from him he seemed overshadowed as they raced on ahead clutching that original flaming torch he himself had once carried. Hemingway for the first time finding himself lost for words was at least able to explain “It just won’t come anymore…”

Many parallels between the two figures; the four-thumbed Gonzo giant and the cojones-clutching literary heavyweight have already been well documented in a great many other blogs and newspaper obituaries; simply type the name of the article into Google and a few thousand links crop up. I don’t feel there is anything special to say regarding any similarities there might have been between the two men or the writing, there is much more to be said about Hunter’s article and the death of his literary hero Hemingway that lends the article a deep sense of foreboding which is clearly wrought in Thompson’s descriptive passages of the bleak scapes of empty Idaho. For Hunter all the signs of his strong empathy with Hemingway were there and by his hand they would grow far out of proportion.

A good example of this perceived empathy is apparent in Thompson’s post-suicide analysis of Hemingway’s last works such as “The Old Man and the Sea” and “A Moveable Feast” culminating, he thought, in the beginnings of a lived epitaph. “The Old Man…” cut from a much larger epic novel that never arrived, tells of a lonely fisherman who makes one last journey out to sea and after catching the biggest Marlin he’d ever found gradually has it picked apart by sharks as he tries to sail it back in to land. When he arrives he is left with only the bare skeleton of the fish and despite the other fishermen’s declaration that it would have been an impressive size the parable strikes a bleak chord as the old man is denied his true reward of bringing in such a mighty fish and so despite his accomplishment and the struggle he has endured his victory is at best a hollow one.

Again with “A Moveable Feast” a reminiscence of Hemingway’s time in 1920’s Paris, the gathering of the “Lost Generation”, we see the scattered thoughts of his current situation and even nostalgia take precedence, a tone most unsuited to the former Hemingway, normally so forward looking and irascible.

From these two final works we can notice a clear descent of feeling in Hemingway’s final years. Firstly, of the literary battle having been fought and won at a young age, perhaps too young, only for the glory of victory, a feeling Hemingway no doubt coveted, to slip away when faced by the unfamiliar world he now found himself a part of. Also, with the second book he looked back to the past when the world had been his for the taking, most of his early novels setting the literary world ablaze with his straight-talking harshly realist style that, much like George Orwell, brought the facts to the fore and dwelt on immediate physical sensation when others of the Modernist era were messing around with radical, yet somewhat indulgent, experiments purely in language.

But Thompson, in fact has much in common with the Modernists as well as Hemingway. Yes he tried to “tell it like it is”, especially with his IN-YOUR-FACE frankly bilious political reportage that whilst being very entertaining and crammed full of the “right” facts, was also biased and filled with deeply personal Nixon-loathing. Certainly not the most objective and thus fairly informative reporting that chasing the heels of presidential campaign trails (and potential impeachments) probably required.

But instead of revolutionizing language in such a formal way as the Modernists Thompson ripped up the rules of journalism, he wrote as he moved, drove at high speed, or struggled to keep his feet (and mind) attached firmly to the ground.

Primarily, Hunter was stream-of-consciousness and time-shifting analysis giving him closer ties to Modernists, like Virginia Woolf, instead of the soft touch F. Scott Fitzgerald, another of his literary heroes. Thompson blurbed his conversations verbatim, and lists wig-outs and fluctuous waves of paranoia [in parentheses] when other journalists would mention it was sunny or that the Convention’s sandwiches were merely sub-par. It is this fiery ride that makes Hunter’s writing far more engaging, and thus more widely read and enduring, than “regular” reporting.

But perhaps most importantly the Hemingway piece shows that he could also write in that flowing gentle style, in his stride, he simply chose to transcend it and in doing so wrote to the beat of his own crazy pulsing drum like the mad rhythms of his frantic heart. It was this freer adventurous style of journalism that makes him great, fact blurred with brilliant fiction.

Meanwhile, the alter-ego “Raoul-Duke” was constantly seen stepping in and out of the action like the ugly death masque that many writers claim to see in themselves. This brings out another important similarity between the bitter end shared by Thompson and Hemingway, that of the encroaching sense of doubt, the seeping fear that served to undermine their conviction and thus weaken their resolve to write. Hemingway was fried by EST, like so many other “greatest minds of my generation”, in order to cure his growing sense of depression that he subsequently attempted to drown in drink, no doubt worsening his mental state. He claimed this destroyed his memory and so without the ability to fully remember observations he’d made (the bricks and mortar of any story), he could no longer piece together a novel, he was too fractured, and so, too self-aware that he had become fractious.

Hunter as well seems to have shown similar signs of mental decay. I was always slightly sceptical of his high-drug intake, a fact mentioned in almost every piece of journalism he wrote from the seventies onwards. Mainly because I could never understand how one human being could take so much and still say such dazzlingly humane things. Hunter was certainly aware of this; he often commented that he should have died many times over, not a pleasant thought. And in videos of him there is a visibly growing slur in his speech as he aged, but also the kind of stop-gap speech that sustained drug usage can cause. This is even more noticeable when you remember that Thompson was well known for his staccato “machine-gun” like speech (belying a mind constantly running at full speed) and the rich low timbre of his voice, replaced by the mentally distant drawl of a drooling older man, still funny at times, but lacking that famed initial spark that was well known for ripping the heart from a story and devouring it, still beating, like the wild bloodthirsty lizards of the Vegas strip.

What both men shared in their final days is a gradual erosion of their sense of belonging as a writer and thus of their purpose in life. All men come to fear the world as they grow older. Hunter has stated in many interviews that he gradually became more afraid and unstable with his self-created persona of the “Gonzo journalist”, as too did Hemingway with his archetype cut-and-dry tough man hero, always graceful under pressure, both men seemed well aware that their masks were slipping.

David Bowie once talked in a very similar tone as Thompson, of his Ziggy Stardust persona, a skin that he immediately shed once it had served its’ purpose all along with the rush of public fame and notoriety that viciously threatened to consume him. Rich layering of identity upon identity can lead to a mire of unknowable and constantly shifting faces which can in turn lead to a kind of madness. To become something completely unknowable to others is a very exploitable position in the media world, but to lose self-control, the hold upon one’s identity will inevitably lead to an abyss of self-doubt.

Hunter once argued that he never quite knew exactly who, or even how, people expected him to be, Hemingway tried to be like the men he wrote about, either way both men tried to make others happy through living a partial lie, a difficult thing to rest upon one’s conscience.

It seems very sensible to say that even though he was still young, and whether he knew it or not, with the “Ketchum” article Hunter S. Thompson wrote a part of his own future and with it his own final epitaph much better than any other media vulture, myself included, could have said it on his behalf.

The Hemingway article is available in the collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism The Great Shark Hunt 1979.