VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL AND EAT THE CORPSE!

June 16, 2005 11:24 AM

You remember Hunter, right? Sure you do. So does Robert Love, who had the distinct if difficult privilege of editing him.

What Hunter is justly celebrated for, among his other virtues, is his authorial voice, his truest creation, as powerful and unique a voice as exists in American letters. But this instrument, as his editors knew, existed only on paper. Those poor souls who booked him for public speaking gigs found that out soon enough. But Hunter’s authorial voice was perhaps at its purest and most potent in the memos and marked-up manuscript pages that came through the wires late at night and were waiting for us in neat little piles in the fax machine[...] Asked for a touch more detail in this sentence from the Elko piece “For many hours I tossed and turned . . . ,” he came back with “like a crack baby in a cold hallway.”

Enjoy. (Via Incoming Signals.)
posted by languagehat (14 comments total)

Wonderful. Great read, and it made me tear up all over again over what we have lost.

he knew Jackie Onassis

Yikes. I'm trying to imagine that dinner party. I was a bit surprised when the Rolling Stone Obit revealed that he and Jimmy Carter were fairly good friends, but I can't picture this at all.

Also, I've bookmarked Incoming Signals.
posted by anastasiav at 11:39 AM on June 16, 2005

Thanks, that is great. I really find myself missing HST quite acutely, even though I wasn't reading him with any great frequency in recent years. Just a comforting presence hovering out there. Shit.
posted by Divine_Wino at 11:47 AM on June 16, 2005

Wow. Thanks; very, very cool.
posted by COBRA! at 11:49 AM on June 16, 2005

“If you want to call someone a thieving pig fucker, you’d better be prepared to produce the pig.” — Hunter S. Thompson on fact checking.
posted by Divine_Wino at 11:58 AM on June 16, 2005

“If you want to call someone a thieving pig fucker, you’d better be prepared to produce the pig.”

Indeed, no truer words said.
posted by me3dia at 12:14 PM on June 16, 2005

The only people I ever really felt bad for in the perpetual drama that was Hunter Thompson were his editors who would have to try and make sense of his often completely unhinged writing.
posted by fenriq at 12:15 PM on June 16, 2005

[This is great.]
posted by keswick at 12:21 PM on June 16, 2005

For a minute there I thought it was about Fred Dryer, I remember Hunter too, just a different kind of Hunter.
posted by phirleh at 12:38 PM on June 16, 2005

Thanks languagehat. That is a really well written piece. A keeper.
posted by peacay at 12:52 PM on June 16, 2005

The only people I ever really felt bad for in the perpetual drama that was Hunter Thompson were his editors who would have to try and make sense of his often completely unhinged writing.

If you ever get a chance, read the rememberances by a couple of his intern/"minders" in the Rolling Stone Obit issue. They're the ones I feel bad for, and yet jealous of at the same time. Jesus, what a ride.
posted by anastasiav at 12:57 PM on June 16, 2005

Good read, thanks languagehat.

I would have much rather read this instead of than that mistake filled piece of shit by Mikal Gilmore in the Rolling Stone obit issue.
posted by helvetica at 1:57 PM on June 16, 2005

what helvetica said
posted by slackdog at 2:08 PM on June 16, 2005

Great stuff. Thanks languagehat.
posted by dejah420 at 7:50 PM on June 16, 2005

Excellent insight into the editoral process of working with Thompson. I've never read a better description of what it must be like, but had always gleaned little bits of info from other stories.
posted by inthe80s at 8:09 AM on June 17, 2005