Strange Bedfellows

F. Scott Fitzgerald influenced Hunter S. Thompson?-Believe it! (from The New Yorker 3/7/2005)

He {Thompson} also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972.

Speaking of Thompson- a little known LSD Maverick

How I spend my week:

I spent this week (except for work and roommates) alone. I find that I enjoy this solitude tremendously.I think I am going to replace my friends with habits. At least with habits I feel more productive; habits include: running, reading, learning, (many things but mostly history, literature, and possibly a few foreign languages), writing, and practicing piano. I also find that I enjoy watching films at PFA, so last night I viewed a double feature. This, I have never done before, I never thought I had the endurance to watch two films in a row, but I surprised myself. It was part of the Barbara Stanwyck program, I saw two films directed by Douglas Sirk, starring, of course, Stanwyck. It turns out that Monday, July 16 is Stanwyck's 100th birthday. "All in all, as Sugarpuss says, 'Pretty good getting, for a gal that came up the hard way.'” The New Yorker wrote a good article a few months ago on Stanwyck which the two films I saw were mentioned:

"Even Douglas Sirk, the master colorist, stuck to black-and-white when he hired Stanwyck for two of her final melodramas, “All I Desire” and “There’s Always Tomorrow” (1956). Sirk found in her “an amazing tragic stillness,” while praising her discretion: “She gets every point, every nuance without hitting on anything too heavily.” The closeup of her tears, in the first of those films, as her character walks up the path to her family home, to the sound of violins, should be the merest hokum, yet it stirs us like the last dying echo from the age of Garbo. And remember: Stanwyck herself never had a family home."

Now looking forward to a weekend of habits.