Loving 'Fear and Loathing' in Tallahassee.

I was at Borders last Friday, reading a section of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. It's an interesting novel so far, but it takes its time with things -- descriptions of characters go on for pages, and much of the action happens in people's heads. I finished a chapter and took a break to walk around.

I spotted a display of books and saw if there was anything I was interested in. After a moment, I spotted Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It had the movie cover (Johnny Depp's distorted face snaking up vertically) and all I could think of was how thoroughly uninterested I was in the movie.



I grabbed it anyway and headed back to flip through a couple of pages. 50 pages later, I decided that it must be my next read, and, reserving a copy from the library, I promptly blazed through the book in three days. It's not that hard to do -- very easy to understand. Very action-packed.

It was possibly the farthest extreme from Henry James, and it made me want to see the movie again. One of the things I gathered from the reading was that I treat my body and my car very well, and there is much I could do to push the boundaries of both. The Big Lebowski also showed this to me, but I am not too interested in doing anything from either of those two things (except maybe going bowling).

Fear and Loathing is pretty absurd, and as I made my way through the text I found it extremely difficult to determine how much weight I would give to the classification of "nonfiction / journalism" that was printed on the back cover. Thompson makes strong, serious points in the midst of some very humorous scenes, and the whole thing comes off as powerful as Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five. The war here is the war on drugs, and Thompson delivers the battle reports from the drug culture side of things through a frenetic, paranoid state.

It's a quick, light read. Now back to Mr. James.

* * *

Update: I knew it! I know nothing of Thompson or this book, but I had a feeling that it was more or less true, but it had to be fictionalized at points, of course. Don't find me naive.

Some sites

look retarded on a widescreen monitor.

Water foul.

I saw two ducks doing it today at Lake Ella. It happened like this:

The smaller one was in a shallow area of water, and the bigger one stepped up on the other's back, like they were a pair of burglars in a bad comedy flick hopping over a security wall at night. The one standing up looked around a while, and then it started kicking / stomping the one underneath. It was pushing the bottom duck's head in the water and holding it down. Then it lowered down and kept pecking at the lower duck's head, dunking it in the water for long periods.

The bottom one remained still, and halfway through, after I hadn't seen it move the whole time, I thought that the bottom duck might have been dead. The top duck could have been picking pieces out of it, trying to eat it, like hungry lobsters are known to do.

Near the end, another duck came swimming quickly toward the pair. Some small turtles also gathered 'round. I thought that they were trying to rescue the lower duck.

(Homer thinks back to the way he learned about sex as a child...

Homer: "Zookeeper! Zookeeper! Those two monkeys are killing each other!"
Zookeeper: (whispering) They're doing it.)

(source)

It was all over within three minutes or so, then both ducks waded to shore and spread their wings, elegantly flicking the water off their fowl bodies.